Giuditta con la testa di Oloferne

Around 1616 Rubens was the most sought-after painter in Antwerp, running a workshop that turned out altarpieces and mythologies at speed. This is his Judith, the widow from the Old Testament who slipped into the enemy camp, got the Assyrian general Holofernes drunk, and cut off his head to save her besieged town. Rubens shows her just after the act, the severed head in her grip. One detail sets his version apart: he put a wedding band on her finger, letting her be respectable widow and dangerous seductress at once, where earlier painters left the finger bare. The painting is oil on a wood panel. It hangs in Brunswick, in a museum founded in 1754 that is among the oldest in Europe.